Nathan Cullen at the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee

One of the principles in our House is the independence of the committees to operate fully and perform our functions. One of the functions this committee has is to review certain selections for certain officers of Parliament, this being one of them. We also had lobbying as well.

I'm looking through the timeline and the sequence of events with the process, on which I think I've made fully clear my level of dissatisfaction. After three extensions, 18 months of extensions, for the previous officer, in this case, of ethics, we had a one-hour interview, apparently.

To get the point of order here, we had to call these emergency meetings to facilitate this process as the session is winding up before the holidays. The government introduced a motion to vote on the reference of Mr. Dion in this case almost simultaneous to whether this committee was even going to meet and have this brief one-hour time with him. Now Mr. Erskine-Smith has required.... I'm sure his authorship is all over this and his own insights into the wording—